Skyrim on the PC is a beautiful game that's fun to play, but the menu and …

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I was impressed by the graphics and attention to detail when I played Elder Scrolls: Skyrim on the PC, and the first few hours I spent with the game flew by. Soon, however, the game's terrible menus and user interface began to sour the experience, and I found myself tempted to put the game back on the shelf for a month or so until these issues can be fixed.

This might be a contender for game of the year, but it's also a clunky mess once you begin to level up your character, manage your inventory, or use your map. The good news for PC players is that a full suite of modding tools is on the way, and the community will take care of all the balls that were dropped by the original development teams. And boy oh boy, so many balls were dropped.

Jim Rossignol summed up most of the issues I have with the game's usability issues over at Rock Paper Shotgun:

Hell, Oblivion's awkward interface was bad enough, but at least it allowed you to see almost everything at a glance. And sure, Bethesda, take away my stats, but at least allow me to see what I am wearing and equipped with inside the menus? The bonuses I have? Anything? No? And so I have to exit the menu system to look at my character? And I also have scroll through everything just to see what I am carrying? And even when you are clicking about in the menu there's a huge margin of error with a mouse, that most precise of pointing devices? Come on, Bethesda, this is not the future of RPG interface design we were promised.

This graphic from Reddit also does a wonderful job of summing up just how horrible and unintuitive the menus in the game can be:

The mistakes made in the menus are basic and frustrating: why am I scrolling when so much of my screen goes unused? Why is it so tricky to compare the stats of my weapons and gear? It's one thing when a game has an interesting idea and it fails in practice; I think innovations and risks should be celebrated even if they don't pay out in the end. In the case of the menus in Skyrim, there is no grand design or idea. Everything is just clunky and hard to use. It's also designed to be used with a controller, which is extra annoying for those of us on a mouse and keyboard.

Speaking of the mouse, movement with your mouse is a sludgy mess until you turn off mouse acceleration, but there is no way to do this in the game's menus. You have to go into the game's .ini file and make the change manually. This is a very basic flaw, and it's nonsense that it takes so much fiddling to make mouse controls tolerable. Gamefront has a good list of tweaks to make the game a more enjoyable experience on the PC. After a few minutes of tweaking, the game became much more fun.

Still, the real humdinger is the perk system, where you scroll through a series of constellations in order to select new powers for your character. This sounds great on paper, and during E3 it was an impressive visual. But that's what it is: a visual trick. It's very pretty to look at it, but it takes way too long to move from constellation to constellation, and it's impossible to see all the perks you've unlocked across every constellation. This makes it hard to find the cohesion in your character, and it gets in the way of actually building the skill set you want in the game. It's form over function in the worst way, and Gamasutra went as far as calling it the "worst screen in the history of [User Interfaces]."

So the game is bad? Or I should buy it on a console?

No, absolutely not. The game is wonderful, and it's a pleasure to get lost in Skyrim's story. There are plenty of mysteries to solve and enemies to fight, and the game can be played a variety of ways. I've invested way too many hours into it already, and I've barely scratched the surface of what Skyrim has to show me. When other games are sold for $60 and can be finished in under 10 hours, the amount of content included in Skyrim feels almost criminal. There is already talk of DLC, which is insanity; is anyone out there close to being bored with the content that already exists?

The PC version of the game may seem like a clunky mess now, but Bethesda has promised the release of a full suite of tools modders will able to use to bend the game to their will. I've already spoken to people who are in the process of "fixing" the menus, and mods that increase the game's usability should hit the Internet days, if not hours, after the tools are available, and maybe even before. Give it two months, and the PC version should be honed to perfection.

Until then, we can only scratch our heads at the silly design mistakes that riddle the game, enjoy the game's story and beautiful locations, and start flame wars by laughing at how the game performs on the consoles.

With all due respect, having a controller is not 'non-standard' for a PC anymore. EVERYONE I know who games on PC has a controller.

I don't have a controller nor do any of my guildmates. Well I do, if I unplus if from my Xbox, but I have never plugged in a controller into my PC for gaming because I am primarily an RPG/MMORPG player and sometimes an FPS player, none of which benefit from controllers.

I shouldn't explicitly have to use a controller for this type and genre of game. It's forced, makes no sense and there is no respect for the format/environment. If I was playing mortal combat or some other action game like Prince of Persia Sand of Time? Yeah, I can understand and am fully behind that.

i can't help but feel like we have lost more than we have gain in recent years particularly in the RPG genre while building for a console/controller interface. Things like informative & usable paper dolls. Easy to manipulate inventory etc etc. About the only place you can find those nowadays are in the MMORPG space, which, while the graphics may be limited by technology and environmental resources, seems to be well ahead and more progressive than their single player kin from which they came from.

man, I long for a game as good as Skyrim and Witcher 2 with the ease of use and simplicity of World of Warcraft.

I don't have a controller on my PC. And NO ONE I know has a controller.

I've been gaming on a PC since 1990 (yes really) and it never occured to me to plug a game console controller into my PC. Not until I read this very topic today.

I know about 10 guys with gaming PCs. We play CS and HL and Quake deathmatch together. Almost all of us have played Elder Scrolls and Fallout series. No one has a fricken controller dude. Why would we?

It is a problematic business model, one which relies on your customers to fix your design problems. But this model is the one Bethesda is so attached to. I cannot fathom why.

Because it drastically extends the life of the game. Also, as much as I might otherwise agree, it's actually a lot of work to design the game's internals to be so easily accessible to modders.

For me, it's like linux on the desktop. Sure, it's rough around the edges, but because it's so highly configurable (I'm pretending the dual abominations of Gnome3 and Unity don't exist) it's way more flexible.

Or like vim for that matter. Sure, I could have an IDE that just works, except that just works frequently means "gets in the way" of what I really want to do. With vim, almost anything is just a keybinding or plugin away from being exactly what I want.

Trying too hard to get stuff that just works for everyone is what gets us interfaces like Skyrim's, Windows 8's Metro UI, Gnome3, Unity, etc. It's surprisingly easy to over-engineer interfaces.

I'm amazed anyone can defend the Skyrim UI. The game is absolutely tons of fun and addictive as hell, but the UI looks like it was done in the last 5 minutes before release by an intern in his coffee break. Anyone releasing a game with that UI should be ashamed, and this isn't exactly an indie game coded by one guy after work!

And use a controller on PC? What the fuck, I play fps style games on PC because controllers suck at it.

The UI actually has some additional bugs as well.I don't use WASD, I use ASDF. That means I remap some other keys around. In my inventory, it tells me to press F to favorite an item, but I have to press E, or was it W, I don't recall. Sometimes it tells me to press another key, but really it means G. In some screens, I think the Keys are correct.

I agree that the UI is horrible, and it really does detract from the game. It's a shame because the game is pretty fun, other then the large laundry list of broken quests, the crashing to desktop, and the incredibly stupid enemy/companion AI.

I do like that I can drop into the game for 15 minutes and find something to accomplish.

I get the impression that the author of this article hasn't really attempted to use the menu interface without his mouse, but with the keyboard instead. (ASDW keys.) It takes maybe an hour or two to get used to, but once you do it's incredibly fast. You should really try it. It would make most of the conclusions here unwarranted.

Bethesda always does this. They are the little things that start bothering you after a while :\

An additional pet peeve of mine has always been the alchemy section. It is ridiculously hard to make potions (at least in morrowind and oblivion) while it could be so easy. Only showing the valid combinations (somewhat there in oblivion, but still rather limited) and allowing the selection of effects would already solve most of that. 1 man day of work tops, yet they never do it. I do not claim to understand how a game company works, but to me this is mind boggling. Shouldn't a game start from there and then start adding locations etc?

Still I love the games, but they always stay away from excellence because of this.

Bethesda always does this. They are the little things that start bothering you after a while :\

An additional pet peeve of mine has always been the alchemy section. It is ridiculously hard to make potions (at least in morrowind and oblivion) while it could be so easy. Only showing the valid combinations (somewhat there in oblivion, but still rather limited) and allowing the selection of effects would already solve most of that. 1 man day of work tops, yet they never do it. I do not claim to understand how a game company works, but to me this is mind boggling. Shouldn't a game start from there and then start adding locations etc?

Still I love the games, but they always stay away from excellence because of this.

this I think is just their way of inserting fake difficulty to artificially inflate the content. knowing the proper ingredients would be too easy, when players could be wasting their time disseminating this info amongst themselves. there's actually a loading tip that says to try eating random ingredients to guess their effects, are you kidding me? the irony here is in the subject of this article, that the ui is nowhere near useful enough to make this kind of trial and error practical.

let's just eat random butterfly wings and wild plants, because this world is incapable of recording written word or developing a competent interface to tell future generations that eating something could possibly heal or kill you. maybe there's some sort of book we're supposed to find in the game with this info that I'm missing here?

I'm tempted to write and actual response, but I won't. I want to, but I can't. I just have to say this, and only this.

Boo-freaking-ho.

There. I said it. I've been playing this game for almost 40 hours, and I love it to bits. I still have barely scratched the surface of what's available to me, and playing with a controller remedies all the problems you've described. In other words, if you're going to review a game, review it PROPERLY. Don't BITCH for the entire article and then expect anyone to listen to you.

I usually enjoy your reviews. But this was SO damn ridiculous, it's not even funny. You didn't even bother reviewing the game! Skyrim is leagues ahead of anything else out there today, and yet you're being stupid about it while giving proper reviews to FAR inferior twitchy shooters.

Just... so ridiculous. So very, very ridiculous. To judge a game on a single flaw is like to judge a book by the font it's prtined in.

Bad analogy dude!The font a book is printed in is VERY IMPORTANT, in some cases it even decides whether the book can be read or not!

This isn't about shilling, about 100 (or more) people worked on this game, many of them being RPG buffs.Skyrim's UI looks A LOT like something decided by management driven by the holy "don't overcrowd players with information" directive. And yes, while Skyrim is an incredible game on the PC it's UI is SHIT.

Not wanting to be a fanboy here but it seems to me like a lot of post-2009 RPG's had shitty UI's on the PC (Dragon Age 2, Two World 2, Mass Effect 1&2, Skyrim, Arcania, etc.).

We're used to Tabs, List boxes and Radio buttons and they work on the PC so use them in your UI's (again, on the PC).

Skyrim has the equivalent of UI porn. Eric Schwarz totally misses the point in his Gamasutra blog. Skyrim had to have a UI that would suit consoles. This implies ease of navigation (without a mouse) and readable text on the TV from couch-distance. What if these menus are comparatively slow? It is not as if the game doesn't pause the action whilst you are in them. I don't understand why everyone can't chill out and soak in Bethesda's carefully sustained atmosphere.

Well duh, it's a Bethesda game. Bethesda cannot hold onto balls. I've yet to play a Bethesda game where any balls have been held on to. Bethesda's hands and balls are like magnets of the same polarity. They simply will not stay together.

I hate to single out your comment, but I feel this is the most eggregious example of how unreasonable people are.

If a game is 5 hours, it's too short.If a game is 20 hours, it's too short.If a game is 100-200 hours, they "dropped the ball" on other things.

....yeah. Pretty much. What do you expect? We have 3 items: Uncharted 3, Batman:AC, and Skyrim.

One is very short and linear but incredibly polished, one is a bit more wide open, and still relatively polished, and one is a monsterous game with over 120 HAND-CRAFTED dungeons and over 70 voice actors that's rough around the edges. People are expecting the level of polish of Uncharted in a game that is probably around 100x the size of Uncharted.

As a programmer, my head explodes when I think the level of work and detail that goes into a game like Skyrim. I can see past the bugs, see past the UI, because it is obvious that the money that would have gone to these locations went elsewhere that could NOT be fixed after the fact, such as the insane amount of voice acting, addressing a major complaint about Oblivion.

Also, as a PC gamer I realize that I am only a small fraction of the gaming population, and we're lucky we even GET titles at this day in age. Beggars can't be choosers. Boycotting a game like this (as others have suggested) for the lack of PC support will only prove one thing: "There is no market for PC games." Is that really what you want?

But what am I talking about? I'm talking to a generation of people who want everything now, fast, and free.

stormbeta wrote:

fruitbane wrote:

It is a problematic business model, one which relies on your customers to fix your design problems. But this model is the one Bethesda is so attached to. I cannot fathom why.

Because it drastically extends the life of the game. Also, as much as I might otherwise agree, it's actually a lot of work to design the game's internals to be so easily accessible to modders.

No, it's easy. Programming is easy. It's so simple. Why didn't they do it? I could do it in a day. Nay, an hour. *eyeroll*

I like your linux analogy. I can't stand linux, but that's just personal preference and poor driver support. But as the level of complexity increases, the potential for bugs exponentially increases. And people don't understand that. They don't even TRY to understand that.

Which is why Ben was trollbaiting with this article. He should, and does, know better.

Bethesda always does this. They are the little things that start bothering you after a while :\

An additional pet peeve of mine has always been the alchemy section. It is ridiculously hard to make potions (at least in morrowind and oblivion) while it could be so easy. Only showing the valid combinations (somewhat there in oblivion, but still rather limited) and allowing the selection of effects would already solve most of that. 1 man day of work tops, yet they never do it. I do not claim to understand how a game company works, but to me this is mind boggling. Shouldn't a game start from there and then start adding locations etc?

Still I love the games, but they always stay away from excellence because of this.

this I think is just their way of inserting fake difficulty to artificially inflate the content. knowing the proper ingredients would be too easy, when players could be wasting their time disseminating this info amongst themselves. there's actually a loading tip that says to try eating random ingredients to guess their effects, are you kidding me? the irony here is in the subject of this article, that the ui is nowhere near useful enough to make this kind of trial and error practical.

let's just eat random butterfly wings and wild plants, because this world is incapable of recording written word or developing a competent interface to tell future generations that eating something could possibly heal or kill you. maybe there's some sort of book we're supposed to find in the game with this info that I'm missing here?

Alchemy is simple, people are just trolling. The time they spend complaining about it they could have figured it out themselves.

1)Eat every ingredient once and it will give you the first effect.2)Make a potion with 2 objects with the same effect (Restore Health, Restore Health) + 1 object with a different effect.3)Discover new effects on potentially all ingredients.4)Repeat.

It's very simple. It helps if you also get the Alchemy perk that allows you to get the first 2 effects by eating an item, significantly increasing the speed.

Erm.. it's been a while since I actually played Morrowind for real, but I recall its UI being an unintuitive nightmare - by comparison, even though Oblivion's UI was largely dumbed down, actually using it felt much faster and you spent a lot less time in it. Skyrim seems to continue that trend - it's obviously not optimised for a PC monitor, but this article makes it sound like a dealbreaker, and there's absolutely no way you can justifiably deem it to be so.

One thing I've noticed about gamers since I started participating more in the community: they like to whinge. Gamers whinge about everything.

In this case, people don't seem aware that hotkeys can be assigned to items through the alt key Favourites menu, too.

Eh, the menus and UI do suck. But after about 40 hours, I'm used to it and the suckitude no longer bothers me. I know where everything is and how to get to it. Plus, an this is important to note, the mouse wheel still works to scroll through most menus.

It is by no means game-crippling, Mr. Kuchera. Though I usually agree with your reviews, lately you've had this bad habit of extreme hyperbole designed for no reason other than sensationalism when it comes to the major releases. You complained about BF3 multiplayer being unplayable for PC for instance, yet I and hundreds of thousands of other people were able to play on day one just fine. Now, you're claiming that the Skyrim interface is unplayable. I have to wonder; would you bash an indie game for these things, or are you just jumping on the triple-A hate bandwagon for page views?

I think the issue of Skyrim's poor UI design as it relates specifically to the PC is exaggerated. The UI in general is poor - be it on console or PC. Design flaws like improper usage of space and things of that nature don't suddenly stop existing when you switch platforms.

Generally a lot of the UI issues can be worked around if you can get yourself used to using the WASD keys to navigate the menus instead of the mouse - which is exactly the same behavior as you would do on consoles. The only time this has really given me an issue is on the skill constellations because they are angled in such a way that you can't really get to them using the four basic directions because they are at intervals designed to be navigated to with the 8-direction sticks - that's the one menu that you need to use the mouse for.

The only real issue that this brings is that navigating the UI with your keyboard is not an intuitive process for a PC gamer and using the mouse works sometimes but then sometimes something weird happens and you suddenly purchased a horse and insulted someone's grandmother when you just wanted to ask them a question.

But a lot of these comments essentially come across as if the UI becomes somehow worse on the UI - it was simply a UI that was obviously designed for consoles first and you have to essentially get used to using the UI as if you were a console gamer (and as many have suggested, using an XBox controller on your PC can work).

This. Honestly, the UI issue is being so overhyped because it's really the only genuine point of criticism that I've seen for Skyrim that wasn't more of a matter of opinion as opposed to a genuine design flaw with the game. And while I will agree the UI is poor - it is nowhere even close to as bad as it's being made out to be. It does not make the game unplayable by any means and once you get used to it, it doesn't really inhibit your gameplay in any significant way. Is it a poor UI design? Sure. But I think the issue of the UI is being so vehemently overstated because it's the only significant point of weakness the game has - it makes it easy to harp on.

Jim Rossignol summed up most of the issues I have with the game's usability issues over at Rock Paper Shotgun:

Hell, Oblivion's awkward interface was bad enough, but at least it allowed you to see almost everything at a glance. And sure, Bethesda, take away my stats, but at least allow me to see what I am wearing and equipped with inside the menus? The bonuses I have? Anything? No? And so I have to exit the menu system to look at my character? And I also have scroll through everything just to see what I am carrying? And even when you are clicking about in the menu there's a huge margin of error with a mouse, that most precise of pointing devices? Come on, Bethesda, this is not the future of RPG interface design we were promised.

- Press R to make sure you're not holding anything (or prepping spells)- Mousewheel down to scroll back to third person- Rotate mouse 180 degrees to be facing your character- Mousewheel up to scroll up to an acceptable zooming value depending on what you want to preview- Press TAB and enter items subsection- Enjoy the items preview when you click on hem.

I play this game exclusively on the PC. All I have to say is that the UI is great for me. Sure i wish i could see more things in menues, and my cabinets need to be organized. However navigating everything with the keyboard? Awesome. Unless theres only a small mod to tweak whats already there, I'm leaving it vanilla. Everyone else is crazy.

I play this game exclusively on the PC. All I have to say is that the UI is great for me. Sure i wish i could see more things in menues, and my cabinets need to be organized. However navigating everything with the keyboard? Awesome. Unless theres only a small mod to tweak whats already there, I'm leaving it vanilla. Everyone else is crazy.

I have a mouse for a reason: it's a better tool than a keyboard for navigating menus. Keyboard is fine for hotkeys and movement, but once I'm in a menu (inventory, stores, conversation, etc) I shouldn't have to touch the keyboard. There should be a testing mode that disables all keyboard input while menus are open to force the beta testers to verify that everything works well with a mouse.

Also, they need to be much more consistent about how key remapping works. I tried remapping the 'E' command to middle mouse button (M3), but certain uses of 'E' (such as taking a book from the reading screen) don't get correctly remapped. 'E' stops working, but M3 doesn't work either, so you have to exit the reading screen and change back to the default mapping to take a book.

I still have barely scratched the surface of what's available to me, and playing with a controller remedies all the problems you've described. In other words, if you're going to review a game, review it PROPERLY. Don't BITCH for the entire article and then expect anyone to listen to you.

I usually enjoy your reviews. But this was SO damn ridiculous, it's not even funny. You didn't even bother reviewing the game! Skyrim is leagues ahead of anything else out there today, and yet you're being stupid about it while giving proper reviews to FAR inferior twitchy shooters.

Just... so ridiculous. So very, very ridiculous. To judge a game on a single flaw is like to judge a book by the font it's prtined in.

1. This wasn't a review. It was an article about the PC interface.2. A PC gamer should not be expected to own a console controller.3. Okay, please read Lord of the Rings in 18 point Comic Sans, center aligned and get back to me.

(for what it's worth, I'm loving Skyrim, the menus are clunky but I do prefer an alphabetical list to a giant screen full of icons. I don't use the mouse for the menus, WASD+E+R works fine for me)

I have a mouse for a reason: it's a better tool than a keyboard for navigating menus. Keyboard is fine for hotkeys and movement, but once I'm in a menu (inventory, stores, conversation, etc) I shouldn't have to touch the keyboard. There should be a testing mode that disables all keyboard input while menus are open to force the beta testers to verify that everything works well with a mouse.

Also, they need to be much more consistent about how key remapping works. I tried remapping the 'E' command to middle mouse button (M3), but certain uses of 'E' (such as taking a book from the reading screen) don't get correctly remapped. 'E' stops working, but M3 doesn't work either, so you have to exit the reading screen and change back to the default mapping to take a book.

-Kasoroth

Honestly a mouse isnt really that great a tool for navigating menus, I personally feel much more precise on the keyboard. the first thing i learned with this game is that unless you are looking around, dont move the mouse. It will screw up you dialogue choices, you will click on the wrong thing in the menu. All that is true. However, once you play by the games rules, and use the keyboard, the whole thing is a beautiful snap.

This is the neverending problem with Console vs PC. Games made for the console always have menus that could be better if made specifically for PC. User Interface is one of the most important parts of a game and is usually the one that gets the least amount of developer respect. In most games, the interface doesn't need to be that good. In a game like MW3, you can get away with standard console fare even on a PC. But for an RPG that by its very nature was born on in a pen and paper era, menus and stat sheets are the engine that makes it go. They should have spent more time on the PC interface

That's most definitely the case up until the mid-20's when you max out the abilities and you're left to ride on those for the rest of the game, meanwhile enemies get harder.

You get the 16x backstab bonus early. (3000%? It's 16x, unless he's talking about the dual wield ability which is very easy to miss with.) Even the 3x Arrow bonus is incredible for quite some time. Unfortunately, that's only enough if you have enough damage to kill the enemy outright. Which, again, doesn't last all that long.

Even with the full set of equipment you get for finishing the Thieves' Guild quests, you're only really running on that initial hit, and anything you don't get that complete kill on will turn around and destroy you. So no. I'm not providing misleading information. I am basing my information off a level 36 rogue, not a level 5.

In addition, eventually even with 100 Sneak and the perks, there are many fights in dungeons where backstabbing simply isn't an option. It IS possible to run and hide, lose aggro, come back and give it another shot.... but I wouldn't exactly call that ideal. They need to at a minimum increase bow damage, and possibly increase the defense of light armor. It's great IF you get that backstab, but good luck sneak attacking a dragon.

Nisuo,

Personally I haven't hit a wall with my rogue-like character. As for the review, I'm not sure what level they got to without re-reading it, but I think they said they'd put 55 hours into the game. I'd have to assume they were in their 30's?

I don't know where the 3000% comes from. That would be 30x normal damage. I'm not sure that's possible, but maybe it is.

Also, for me, I never would expect a rogue character to be able to do all things. Just as a mage can struggle in certain situations. So my rogue is competent in melee with light armor and a sword if necessary (though I rarely fall back on this). More typically I'll conjure a friend to help out if I can't "rogue" my way through a situation. In my eyes, the game is working as intended and as advertised. Bear in mind that Oblivion was clearly broken for rogue characters and I'd even argue that their whole leveling system was broken. Not bad: broken.

But I'll come back to my earlier point of not expecting a rogue character to be able to do all things at all times. No class is going to be able to do that (except perhaps melee characters). Like most RPGs, this game has a self-difficulty slider: some ways of play will be harder then others. Fortunately, unlike Oblivion, it actually seems to work pretty well in Skyrim.

In any case, reviewing some of your earlier comments, you sir, are most definitely not a troll. I just thought your blanket statement about rogues (without backup at the time) was dangerous and you felt the weight of my desire to rebut half of the comments on this thread (which I've been self-controlled enough to mostly ignore).

One final thought: I have begun to wonder if playing an enchant heavy rogue would be useful. Enchanting seems very worthwhile even though I've put almost no time (and certainly no perks) into it. Perhaps in the late game it might enable the creation of much more powerful bows/dagges/armor to mitigate weaknesses your seeing in your character?

In any case, all the best!

FYI the 30x comes from the combination of 15x dagger backstab bonus ON TOP of the 2x BASE damage bonus of one handed weapon skill. 15 times a doubled base damage is 30x. If you include possible double from a critical backstab you can get even more.

1) No Character Breakdown screen. (armor preview, overall stats)2)Why should I have to close the menu just to access another side.3) Mouse inaccuracy (so basic that it makes it obvious they prioritized consoles)

That being said I prefer this menu over Oblivions. Maybe menu navigation was better, but presentation was outdated and ugly. I have some awesome screens of me entering the menu during fighting right as a dragon is trying to eat my face. Although the navigation should be tweaked, this game is about being part of the world, not engrossed in menus. And after playing 40+ hours the UI really hasn't affected how much I love this game.

Lastly, even though its annoying that Bethesda releases buggy games, at least they still support their PC community. Thats a dying thing these days (I'm looking at you Bioware!)

I paid particular attention as I played last night to the interface and really the only issues I have are that there is no way to see everything you have equipped on one screen, and there is no way to sort. The menu's are easy to navigate (on a console) and the gripes about having to scroll are only relevant to the PC (there is no direct click interface for the console).

However, for all of you claiming this is the worst inventory/stat management in a PC RPG ever, may I point you to one of my all time favorite PC RPGs, Ultima 7. You could spend days just trying to find that magic ring you lost somewhere in your loot. Plus it was the only game that I ever ran into memory overflows for having too many different inventory windows open on screen at one time.

No, it's easy. Programming is easy. It's so simple. Why didn't they do it? I could do it in a day. Nay, an hour. *eyeroll*

I like your linux analogy. I can't stand linux, but that's just personal preference and poor driver support. But as the level of complexity increases, the potential for bugs exponentially increases. And people don't understand that. They don't even TRY to understand that.

Which is why Ben was trollbaiting with this article. He should, and does, know better.

So you are saying that it is programmatically more difficult to make a good interface than a a polished but poorly thought out interface? It's programmatically easier to make a list of 9 items appear on screen with 4 items offscreen? No. it's actually easier to do it properly in this particular case because you don't even need scroll functionality for this UI list.

As a programmer you are imposing a programmer's problems into a situation where they aren't even relevant. How much of a list is visible or not isn't a programming problem. Which buttons you press to do things in the menu aren't a programming problem. Using text instead of icons isn't a programming problem. The problems with this UI have almost nothing to do with programming at all, they are DESIGN DECISIONS. Somebody decided that it should look this way. Programmers would have had to spend just as much time to make this poorly designed interface as to make a well designed one. The programming demands aren't necessarily different.

- Press R to make sure you're not holding anything (or prepping spells)- Mousewheel down to scroll back to third person- Rotate mouse 180 degrees to be facing your character- Mousewheel up to scroll up to an acceptable zooming value depending on what you want to preview- Press TAB and enter items subsection- Enjoy the items preview when you click on hem.

This is a stunningly outdated method of doing something. Having a shot of your character when you open an inventory or even a preview window popping up when you control click ala World of Warcraft would be much simpler and faster. I don't want to imagine how that all progresses w/the 360 controller.

As far as the issue of using a controller on a PC goes, the only reason I've owned a controller at all in the past decade was for playing emulated console games. I think I specifically bought an old Gravis controller to play Dracula X and Blazing Lazers about a decade ago. Of course, I have Blazing Lazers on the Wii these days heh.

made a rule for myself in games, if its not fun or interesting dont do it.

Witness fishing in WoW. Dear lord that is dull as shit. Star Wars Galaxies had a new bar come up that had different ways you could move the bobber around to try and entice the fish, made a real mini-game out of it. Fishing in WoW is just cast, watch, click, pray. Lame. So sad all of the areas some games could make fun but things are either left very plain (WoW fishing) or made extraordinarily complex (SWG Bio-Engineering) and thus become frustrating for the player.

I'm tempted to write and actual response, but I won't. I want to, but I can't. I just have to say this, and only this.

Boo-freaking-ho.

There. I said it. I've been playing this game for almost 40 hours, and I love it to bits. I still have barely scratched the surface of what's available to me, and playing with a controller remedies all the problems you've described. In other words, if you're going to review a game, review it PROPERLY. Don't BITCH for the entire article and then expect anyone to listen to you.

I usually enjoy your reviews. But this was SO damn ridiculous, it's not even funny. You didn't even bother reviewing the game! Skyrim is leagues ahead of anything else out there today, and yet you're being stupid about it while giving proper reviews to FAR inferior twitchy shooters.

Just... so ridiculous. So very, very ridiculous. To judge a game on a single flaw is like to judge a book by the font it's prtined in.

Yeah, I've got to agree on this sentiment. I'm 70 hours into this monstrosity of a game, and might I add other than a few crash to desktops, thats 70 hours WITHOUT INCIDENT. This is probably the best game to come out all year, and your headline review title is "Skyrim is a frustrating mess" with the quality of the games content as the follow up, instead of the lead?! You're too funny.

Did Bethesda butthurt you pre-release to warrant this lame ass review or did you just have something better to do? The only reason I ask this is that this smacks of developer/reviewer animosity, and if thats the case, WHO CARES. Your readers don't give 2 shits if the girl in marketing lost the sorting code for your pc review copy, they want to hear about the actual game. You never make it past the menus.

Who cares, it's not like every reputable game review site on the damn planet got a competent review out the door days ago, while all we've heard from you is this drivel.

I'm tempted to write and actual response, but I won't. I want to, but I can't. I just have to say this, and only this.

Boo-freaking-ho.

There. I said it. I've been playing this game for almost 40 hours, and I love it to bits. I still have barely scratched the surface of what's available to me, and playing with a controller remedies all the problems you've described. In other words, if you're going to review a game, review it PROPERLY. Don't BITCH for the entire article and then expect anyone to listen to you.

I usually enjoy your reviews. But this was SO damn ridiculous, it's not even funny. You didn't even bother reviewing the game! Skyrim is leagues ahead of anything else out there today, and yet you're being stupid about it while giving proper reviews to FAR inferior twitchy shooters.

Just... so ridiculous. So very, very ridiculous. To judge a game on a single flaw is like to judge a book by the font it's prtined in.

Yeah, I've got to agree on this sentiment. I'm 70 hours into this monstrosity of a game, and might I add other than a few crash to desktops, thats 70 hours WITHOUT INCIDENT. This is probably the best game to come out all year, and your headline review title is "Skyrim is a frustrating mess" with the quality of the games content as the follow up, instead of the lead?! You're too funny.

What I find funny is how many people apparently mistake this article for a review.

Ben obviously likes the game. Rather than giving a review based on first impressions, he's currently (maybe even this very moment!) playing through the game so that he can give an in-depth review later.

That's not what this article is about. The article is about perceived short-comings in the UI. It is not very surprising that an article about the short-comings of an UI focuses on short-comings in the UI.

Are there short-comings in the UI? I'd say that this seems pretty obvious.Can a game still be great while having this type of short-comings? I'd say that most people agree that Skyrim is still a great game, despite any short-comings.Do the short-comings stop being short-comings just because the game is great? No.

A bit of a lengthy rant that is summed up fairly well with the comparison screenshots of Morrowind vs. Skyrim. The inventory and magic menus could both be pulled up simultaneously; inventory on the left, magic on the right. These menus are the two most commonly used, anyhow, and as others pointed out here, it's kinda annoying having to completely close out of the menus to go from one to the other.

The skill perk menu is annoying in 1. how you have to scroll around so much, 2. When you select a tree you zoom ALL THE WAY IN, which leads to 3. I may click on a branch to check another perk, say, in the destruction tree, only to end up thrown over into the Conjuration tree. If the silly menu didn't zoom all the way in like it does and simply just highlighted/selected/activated the tree so you could mouse over all the perks, it would suffice nicely.

Only other minor caveat: It would be nice if the text you have selected/moused over highlighted a different color or something. Example: I get a nervous twitch when I mouse over the selection to trade items with my companion only to see the text "I think it's time we part ways" highlighted in bright white with my cursor being relatively close. I haven't accidentally hit that selection yet, but it still irks me.

Despite these nitpicks, I still believe this game is absolutely freaking fantastic and a joy to play. It would get my GOTY vote were I to be in on such.

Note: I am not going to pretend to be the be-all know-all about this game or it's UI so if something I mentioned here can be alleviated in-game already and I've somehow overlooked/missed it, do tell.

I guess I sacrifice small babies at midnight when the moon is full, and perform all sort of devious acts of sacrilege in my spare time; because I actually LIKE the menus compared to Oblivion or Morrowind. As relatively late PC gamer; I built my own rig, and feel much more comfortable with an Xbox controller than playing with M+KB. I do agree that having primary support for a game with a non standard controller isn't a smart thing to do, and my friend can't even play Skyrim because of the sheer frustration of the mouse hardware acceleration issue you mentioned in the article.

To me Oblivion's menus were tedious with the mouse selecting each individual sub menu and only have maybe 40% of the menu for the entire map and no way to full screen it pissed me off, but like some of the commenters I just *put shades on* Dealt with it.

I do wish though that the spell duration would be displayed by the magicka meter similar to how your weapon charge meter is displayed, and wish that the item inventory screen would be larger as to not have to squint your eyes every now and again, but some of the reddit comments about having small icons when your scrolling I think are unnecessary when you have the massive thumbnail of what the image is right next to the list.

You know if it wasn't this UI issue I guess everyone would be complaining about how Skyrim doesn't take you out on dates. You found the only thing barely wrong with this game (that has an extremely simple fix) and blew it the fuck up. I'm gonna ask for a refund because I can't actually touch the in game boobies.

With all due respect, having a controller is not 'non-standard' for a PC anymore. EVERYONE I know who games on PC has a controller.

Then you and "everyone you know" is doing it badly wrong. Talk about clueless.

Yup and all those console gamers out there should be using the original NES controller to play their PS3 and X360 games. Times are a changin' CATCH UP!

You'd almost make sense if...well, no, you really aren't making sense no matter what we take into regard. But to the point, NES controllers aren't paired with modern systems while a Keyboard and Mouse are matched to the PC as its primary controllers and by any sane account out there, the BEST control scheme for FPS, RTS, and in most cases, RPG games as well.

You may want to go back to comparison school and work on a more apt and intelligent comparison - this one makes about as much sense as using a craptacular gamepad to control FPS, RTS, or RPG games.